


Waiting For You

by tasteofhysteria



Category: Latin Hetalia - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, I refuse to write any more BrArg, Imagery everywhere, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-04
Updated: 2012-09-04
Packaged: 2017-11-13 14:09:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/504332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tasteofhysteria/pseuds/tasteofhysteria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>University AU! </p><p>This is not only Martín's bad habit, but his worst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting For You

He wondered why he kept doing this to himself.  
  
He waited for the nights he knew his evil roommate Jorge (or Ricardo or José or Marco or whatever name Martín decided to call him that day) would be gone with his own friends or whatever that moron did in his spare time and without fail, Martín would ask (insist) that Luciano come keep him company for the night. Because friends just hang out sometimes, so there wasn’t some kind of—ulterior motive or anything.  
  
It was just that each time, Martín was sure he’d built up enough courage to say it. Again. This time for sure he’d be able to say it and say it right, like he meant it because he  _did_.  
  
At the same time, the words would stick in his throat and he’d be left gazing at the TV screen in silence as Luciano dozed off or staring across the room at where Luciano would be sleeping in his idiot roommate’s bed, hidden by the late night shadows. Or sometimes, the worst nights, he’d be left with Luciano in his own bed (too freaked out by some terrible horror movie to sleep alone). He’d have his forehead pressed between Luciano’s shoulder blades and lay there for hours, trying to will away the shaking in his hands.  
  
It was one of those nights, although there hadn’t been any horror movie to scare Luciano into Martín’s bed. He’d simply stood up with a yawn and stretched, and he climbed beneath the covers and rolled over to face the wall as though it was his right. Martín sat on the floor for another moment, steeling himself for another sleepless night before he stood as well and turned off the small television. He spent a moment staring at Luciano’s back and biting down on his lower lip until he could feel his teeth biting into the soft flesh until it was nearly ready to bleed.  
  
Bad habits.  
  
It wasn’t really worth the embarrassment of Luciano rolling over to ask what was taking so long and catching the Argentinian staring at him, so it was only a few seconds later that he was gingerly sliding in next to Luciano, marveling at the idiocy of two grown men willingly crowding themselves into a twin-sized bed and mentally preparing to begin his usual nightly activity of staring at Luciano’s back and counting the seconds between each breath in and each breath out. He’d gotten a fairly consistent average of six and half seconds between each, so maybe tonight he’d just lay there and count how many breaths Luciano took until he fell asleep himself. It was like his masochistic way of counting sheep, maybe. Something degrading and stupid like that, since he was an idiot who was still in love with an even bigger idiot that had already rejected him once. Still, he’d tried evasion and it hadn’t worked, since Luciano still sought him out like a lost puppy, and Martín had tried ignoring him, but then Luciano would look at him with those wide, dark eyes full of hurt and confusion, and Martín had relented. Honestly, it was easier for Martín to be nearer to Luciano than far away if only to keep an eye on him and make sure he didn’t get into too much trouble and cause Martín endless headaches with the aftermath.  
  
(And he may have had a secret agenda against any well-intentioned but sadly misguided suitors for Luciano’s attention. They were swiftly rebuffed and warned away with a sharp glare before the Brazilian even took notice.)  
  
It was sort of beside the point and not really something he felt like thinking about at the moment, so he turned his mind to the easier pursuit of counting the rise and fall of Luciano’s sides. Somewhere between two and five, he realized that his consistent average of six and a half seconds had dropped to four seconds and that meant that Luciano was still awake.  
  
“Oyé. Boludo,” Martín muttered, feeling guilty without exactly knowing why. “You should be asleep, you know.”  
  
He received no reply save for Luciano moving slightly beneath the covers and a soft inhale that was the precursor to words about to be spoken. The intake of breath was cut off as though Luciano had decided against whatever it had been he wanted to say and had bitten his tongue instead. Martín suddenly remembered that Luciano had a game to play in the morning, a really important one for the tournament and that he’d tried to tell Martín that tonight was no good—Martín had still insisted.  
  
He lay there staring at Luciano’s back and biting his lip viciously, brows arching downward to knit together anxiously.  
  
“You should be asleep,” he repeated. “I know tomorrow is important and you’ll be a zombie on the field because you didn’t get enough sleep.”  
  
Luciano exhaled and went still again, his breathing now undetectable to Martín’s eyes. He continued speaking nervously.  
  
“You’ve got your work cut out for you tomorrow, you know. You’re good, but you’re not invincible. And if you don’t get enough sleep, no amount of café is going to make it better, so go to sleep.”  
  
It hurt somewhere inside to keep staring at the rigidness of Luciano’s spine, so he gazed at the way the moonlight passed through the sheer green curtains over the window instead. It painted gradients on the walls that made them exotic and reminiscent of optical illusions for the way it twisted around the moldings and threw itself ocean-deep into the corners, a far cry from the plain mediocrity that daylight showed.  
  
“I’ll kick your ass if you ruin this for us. I have money on this game, you know. You’re not going to make a poor man out of me.”  
  
He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and then opened them wide so that discreet sparkles danced in his vision, shifting right, then at an upward diagonal before falling south and flooding away in every direction.  
  
“But you should be grateful. That means I’m watching you. But—”  
  
 _—but I always watch you anyway_ , he almost said. The words stuck in his throat and again and God he was disgusted by the fact that he was growing accustomed to it. He was  _Martín Hernández_  and he’d gone soft and stupid over some monkey boy of a Brazilian. Fucking ridiculous. His pride had suffered so much trauma  _already_  from this stupidity and he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t just get  _over_ Luciano and move on to someone deserving or—or  _prettier_  or  _smarter_  than Luciano.  
  
…they just wouldn’t be Luciano and that’s where Martín was stuck.  
  
“…but why am I still talking?” he asked the still air quietly. “Either you’ve gone to sleep or you’re fine with letting me look crazy.”  
  
He lifted his hand and let it fall into Luciano’s hair, planning only to give the Brazilian a playful shove of the head to alleviate the suddenly tense air, but he found his fingers carding through Luciano’s dark curls slowly.  
  
“I look crazy anyway though, when I think about the fact that—”  
  
Somewhere from the shadows, Luciano’s hand caught atop Martín’s own and paused his gentle motions by tangling their fingers together. Martín’s breath hitched as Luciano turned over and braced himself on his elbows, letting their interlaced hands rest on the mattress.  
It came back, that urge to bite down on his lip until it bled and stung. Bad habits.  
  
He couldn’t see Luciano’s expression, obscured in the darkness as it was. Bare expanses of sun-bronzed skin were lit up with the subtle glow pouring in through the window as clouds passed over the moon, letting him catch only the slightest shine of Luciano’s eyes. The need to bite his lip grew with the sudden sensation of  _wanting_ , just to touch Luciano’s cheek or hair again or to bury his face in that spot where Luciano’s neck met his shoulder and just breathe him in with the smell of laundry detergent and something that was fresh and clean and purely Luciano’s, sentimental and stupid as it sounded in his head, so it was of course forbidden to act on it because  _really Martín what are you even thinking_.  
  
He was biting his lip, he realized. Biting his lip and staring at the Brazilian hovering beside him like they were in some kind of idiotic romance movie where a series of unfortunate misunderstandings occurred and caused the love interests to hate each other until near the end.  
  
But this is real life, Martín argued with himself, this is real life and being impulsive and just kissing him all of a sudden because you want to isn’t going to fix anything and it might just make it worse because if you will  _kindly_  remember last time you just did whatever the hell you wanted when it came to Luciano, it sort of backfired on you magnificently so just—don’t make assumptions about things and go to sleep. He can sit there forever if he wants, but it doesn’t mean you have to stay awake to see if he keeps staring at you all night or something. Just go to sleep.  
  
He clenched his eyes shut again, erasing Luciano from view as though it would help him forget that Luciano was even there. As though it would help. His bottom lip gave a twinge of pain as his teeth dug into it again.  
  
 _Just go to sleep._  
  
A soft sigh had his eyes fluttering open, momentarily blinded by those odd lights that he could never explain snapping in his vision. The clouds concealing the moonlight finally passed and if Martín was a less dignified person, he probably would’ve whined when it spilled through the window and the green curtain, painting Luciano in a latticework of silver and verdigris that seemed to cause his skin to glow with a copper luminosity and all sorts of other poetic hues and colours but really all that it was—  
  
“God,” Martín blurted hoarsely, “why are you so beautiful?”  
  
Luciano’s breath fanned across Martín’s face as it escaped him, accompanied by a soft wordless noise of disbelief.  
  
The silence stole Martín’s own breath from his lungs so that the two of them lay there together, breath stolen, breathless, or not daring to breathe maybe. Because really, a what thing to say after he had already told himself not to be impulsive or assumptive and he really just should have gone to sleep, Luciano and his—his damned beauty and somatic colours were  _forcing_  Martín to say things, because Luciano was dumb enough to never know if someone didn’t tell him and like  _hell_  Martín would let someone else say this kind of stupid thing to Luciano in the first place.  
  
…so really, if he had enough courage to say that much, the rest of it…the rest of it should come easily enough.  
  
Martín drew in a breath as a car passed by on the main road, sending its headlights through the panes of glass that made up the dorm windows, sliding over the curve of Luciano’s cheek and flickering in his hair to flash over his eyes from a brief moment. Martín breathed out as the sound of the engine faded into the distance. In that brief moment that Luciano’s face had been illuminated with a fluorescent glow, Martín had caught sight of a strange  _waiting_  expression on Luciano’s face.  
  
He didn’t exactly know what the hell he was waiting for, except for Martín to maybe make a fool of himself again.  
  
“…so,” he said at last. Then he stopped. What was he thinking? This wasn’t going any better than last time, and that had been an unmitigated disaster as far as confessions of adoration went. He’d barely said anything at all and he’d already ruined it. He had wanted to do this  _right_ , not that there was really a  _right_  way to do this, no proper protocol or etiquette, nothing in the way of previous precedent for how you were supposed to confess your embarrassingly squishy feelings to another boy. He knew. He’d googled it and everything and the entirety of the internet seemed to think that Luciano would appreciate being doted on like a girl, with candles and flowers and all those kinds of things. Martín was of the opinion that doing something like that would get him punched in the face, so he was flying blind.  
  
One would think that getting shot down once already in the same scenario would provide some insight into how to do it properly the next time, but—  
  
“So—I know you find me obnoxious, and you probably find the very air I breathe offensive in some way because, you know, you say things like that a lot. So it makes me wonder why I put up with you in the first place because you’re annoying and you say stupid things all the time and I could do better. I could do a lot better, like—like Victoria Alcorta from my lab class. She’s smart and pretty and classy and she likes me, you know, so I just can’t think of why—”  
  
Martín swallowed thickly over the lump in his throat and turned his face into the cooler side of the pillow beneath his head, staring at the far wall and his idiot roommate’s bed shoved against it, caches of greenish light and labyrinths of murky shadows trapped in the folds and wrinkles of its sheets. It was the space that Luciano should’ve been occupying, and Martín knew that there was exactly four and a half steps between that bed and where he was laying at that very moment. It seemed like the distance was a million miles just slapping him in the face.  
  
“I could have anybody else, anyone at all. But I only want you.”  
  
The room went silent; the constant hum of water pipes in the walls stopped, the avid videogame fan in the room next door finally turned off his system for the night, there was no gentle roar of car tires on pavement outside, the tree branches waving by the window stilled. There was no sound of breath. The quiet crystallized into a jagged edge, splintering like too-thin ice—  
  
—and suddenly there was the column of an arm tattooed with a filigree of light contrasts in front of his eyes, a heavy weight settling over his hips, and the dim light coming through the window was blocked out, making Martín blink in confusion at this development and squirm. Fingers were threading into his hair and pushing gently against his chin to turn his head and Martín was looking at a Luciano that was much closer than before, staring into eyes he’d once jokingly said were the color of mud and he still felt bad about that, really, but he hadn’t been able to come up with a better analogy for them to sort of apologize for saying it. Luciano seemed content to watch him think, still petting his hair and stroking a slow crooked line from Martín’s jaw to the corner of his mouth with his thumb and settling so that they lay chest to chest. Martín felt a bit winded, both from Luciano’s weight and the crushing mass of uncertainty sinking in to pound loudly behind his temples.  
  
“Luciano,” he said finally, “what are you doing?”  
  
“Looking at you,” Luciano replied as though it should have been obvious. Martín glared at him furiously.  
  
“You asshole,” Martín hissed, “is that really all you’re going to do?!”  
  
Luciano stared at him blankly.  
  
“I just nearly killed myself saying all of that—and this is the second time too, you know, so—so you’re really just going to sit there and _look_?” Martín demanded. “Stop messing with me! At least shoot me down again once and for all so I can kick you out and—”  
  
“Can I kiss you?”  
  
Martín went very still, blinking rapidly and suddenly able to take note of the faint blush rising in Luciano’s cheeks in the dark and how his eyes darted to Martín’s parted lips in a failed attempt at subtlety. And so, he thought, so—  
  
“Are you going to cry if I don’t let you?”  
  
He wanted to kill himself right there for saying it, but Luciano started laughing and framed Martín’s face between his palms and so maybe, he thought, maybe he hadn’t totally ruined this. Maybe.  
  
“And who’d cry over kissing you?” Luciano asked between chuckles. “Are you so good at it that I should cry for missing it? There’s no way you’re  _that_  good, Martín.”  
  
“I’m the best,” Martín protested, grabbing Luciano’s wrists in a loose grip and frowning up at him. “You have no idea what you’re missing, you know.”  
  
Luciano’s hands were too warm against his face, thumbs tracing aimless patterns on his cheeks as the Brazilian went quiet, eyes roaming over every detail. The tangles in Martín’s hair, the flush in his bottom lip where he’d been worrying it with his teeth, the dark stain of a blush bridging over his nose because he always reddened easily, and Martín felt—felt exposed, and he usually hated that with a passion because it felt like being judged, but this was like Luciano was trying to commit him to memory, maybe to tell everyone what he looked like after he got rejected  _again_  or maybe. Maybe something else.  
  
“Can I?” Luciano asked softly.  
  
His face was so open and his expression so sweet and his eyes so honest that Martín lay there in awe for a moment, barely feeling the smile that threatened to split his face in two. A triumphant choir sang in echoes through his veins, accompanied by the thrum of his heartbeat pounding against his chest and an odd swooping sensation in his stomach that he couldn’t say he hated.  
  
This was it, he finally realized.  
  
“Stop making me wait for you.”


End file.
